MS Office - Send To --> Mail Recipient w/Zimbra

We're in the process of migrating to Zimbra, and moving our users from Outlook to the Zimbra Web Client. For a certain group of our users the biggest sticking point is that the ZWC does not work with the Microsoft Office function 'File --> Send To --> Mail Recipient'.

We are a wholesale distributor and this group of users logs into one of our vendor's system with proprietary software. They are then able to extract information about orders and shipments, and it automatically puts this information into a Word or Excel document. At this point they want to forward along this information to our customers, and are used to doing the one step File --> Send To --> Mail Recipient. They claim that within the group they do this process hundreds of times a day, and the extra steps of having to save the file somewhere and then go to ZWC to create a new e-mail message and attach the document is very time consuming.

I know this subject has been brought up before and there is an RFE (12845) to have the Toaster application handle this. However, there is no time-frame of when, or even if, this functionality will be added to Zimbra; nor do I expect any time-frame to be posted. I'm just wondering if any other Zimbra users have come up with any creative and/or innovative ways to handle this whether it be through some type of scripting, registry hacks, 3rd party apps, etc.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated. If I can come up with a solution to this one I will definitely be the hero of the day

However, I'm afraid there probably aren't any simple hacks to make it happen.

Kind of what I expected. I'm even considering using another email client in conjunction with ZWC just for this purpose. However, I want it to be something that fires up automatically and is basically invisible to the user. I haven't found a good solution yet.

I only hope that everyone who desires to see this functionality will vote for the enhancement. With Zimbra, votes do count.

Right, votes count, and with only five current votes I don't see it as a high priority enhancement from Zimbra's viewpoint. Unless it is something easily added, which I doubt, I'm not expecting it any time soon.

As entrenched as MS Office is in the corporation, I'm surprised more people haven't voted for it. Users are so accustomed to selecting File -> Send To from within Excel & Word. That was one of the first things my users asked about.

As entrenched as MS Office is in the corporation, I'm surprised more people haven't voted for it. Users are so accustomed to selecting File -> Send To from within Excel & Word. That was one of the first things my users asked about.

Good point. The more I hang around these forums, the more I wonder how many businesses are trying to exclusively use the ZWC. I think a lot have the Network Edition and use the Outlook Connector. This would have been great for us too, but right now it's not an option due to financial reasons. We had planned on using Outlook in IMAP mode, at least initially, but Outlook in this mode has so many holes (specifically not being able to control where Sent and Deleted Items go) that we decided to scrap that idea.

Sometime down the road, I'd like to move away from the whole MS Office suite. Keeping Outlook around makes that a much more difficult task.

I wish you luck on this one. I just got called into an Executive Meeting yesterday to discuss our Zimbra migration. One of the Execs was all up in arms because he thought we were going to take away the whole Office suite. I had mentioned in one of my project update documents that for lightweight Office users we could potentially have them use the ZWC for e-mail and OpenOffice for documents to save money on the MS Office licenses. He somehow interpreted this to mean we were taking Office away from everyone. As much as I'd love to go that route, Word, Excel, PP, and Access are just too ingrained into our environment.

All in all, the web client is very nice, and with the advent of Zimbra Desktop, I believe more people will begin ditching Outlook.

The Web Client is great in my opinion. I used it for several months before deciding to begin the process of migrating our users. I thought I was a pretty typical e-mail user in our company, but I've gotten a lot of "How come I can't do this in Zimbra? I used to be able to do it in Outlook." Most of them we've been able to address, except of course this "Send To --> Mail Recipient" issue. People just hate change; I guess it's human nature.

Zimbra Notifier version 4.0.5 now supports MS Office send to.
Also you can, from windows explorer, right clic a file, choose "Send to" from the contextual pop-up menu and choose "Zimbra in draft folder".
If you selected a folder, it will be ziped before. If you want to zip a file before sending it to zimbra, press shift key while sending.